Thank you, Chair.
This is my first time on the health committee, and I'm glad I'm here at this time, when your esteemed witnesses are doing quite the job of telling us what challenges we face in the health care system. I'm from small-town rural Canada. You see it with your neighbours, the challenges they're facing. Many times the so-called children, adult children, don't live in the community anymore, and many times the seniors are taken out of the home because there's nobody there to take care of them. You mentioned this, that it's two or three years sometimes that they're in the hospital.
Mr. Nolan, you talked about Brier Island and how they're dealing in creative ways by helping on-site. I think we have to have some more incentives out there. The Australians are doing a lot more to keep rural health care workers in rural communities, whether it's helping them with their loans or giving incentives to doctors, and I think that's one way. The other thing that's been thrown around is that if you stay home with a sick one, you could get EI coverage. If you look at the net return you're going to get—if you can keep a senior or somebody sick in a rural community in their own home, it saves thousands of dollars, and really, it's EI for one year to help that person.
I'd like to hear more about incentives, what government can do to keep people in their homes. I had a gentleman next door who was 85 years old. He was still able, but he had to have a health care nurse come. He was going to stay in his home until he died, and he did, but they'd haul him out because his driveway wasn't clear—little things like that. If somebody had cleaned his driveway, somebody could've been in checking on him. You just wonder sometimes. We don't have creative ways of keeping people in their homes in a rural community.
Should we be doing more on that, getting more services in rural Canada and helping people who are going to stay home, maybe with their mom and dad, or even a sick child that has cancer? How can we help them out more?